


Unfair

by Cards_Slash



Series: Land on Your Feet - series [2]
Category: Assassin's Creed
Genre: M/M, Unrequited Love, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-10
Updated: 2014-05-10
Packaged: 2018-01-24 06:00:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,694
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1594199
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cards_Slash/pseuds/Cards_Slash
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Shaun gave up on the world being fair a long time ago.  That doesn't make things any simpler.</p><p>(Shaun one-shot based in Land on your Feet's verse.  Does not work independently.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Unfair

Shaun was thirteen (or so) when he gave up on the concept of ‘fairness’ because it was really rather childish to suppose that the universe was in, anyway, capable of or interested in evening out everyone’s lot in life. No, some people got shit and some people got riches and some people managed to live a life between those two extremes.

All this he knew, he had accepted and he had moved beyond. At age twenty-one (nearly) his life was shattered by a kidnapping attempt, thwarted only by a chirpy-sounding American with headphones where her ears should be. Rebecca had recruited him under extreme circumstances and led him back to the Assassins who treated him mostly like a necessary burden.

Shaun was a genius though. (He was not showing any arrogance when he said as much either. He simply was smarter than most people.) Slowly-but-surely he worked his way to the top of some social ladder and found himself poised to receive begrudging respect. It was a simple life, providing support to Assassins that needed it and researching a thousand-conspiracies that were worth researching while Rebecca worked on recreating the prototype Animus technology that Abstergo was wasting all their time making.

That was before Rosario, though. Before age twenty-three when Rosario found him. She was only a librarian with a noticeable limp and he was only a computer-geek with minimal importance. Rosario had always been swift-and-ruthless though. She came to him with two goals: the first to investigate this notion of ‘reincarnation’ and the second to take over the failing Italian Brotherhood and return it to the glory it had been during the days of Ezio Auditore Da Firenze’s glorious rule.

It was luck that brought Lucy to their attention, skill that managed to seduce her to their side (skill that Rebecca-and-Shaun provided mostly) and bloody political warfare that brought Rosario to the top ranks of the Brotherhood. She won the loyalty of men, she devoured her competition and she bequeathed the gift of hope upon Assassins who had stared their own inevitable failure in the face and begun to make peace with it. Shaun had been there when Abbas was brought in from the dark-streets of a foreign country and led into the room with a prototype Animus nicknamed ‘Baby’ that Rebecca used to coax the memories hiding in Abbas’ DNA to take over the lacy gaps of memory that this boy who looked like Abbas had created. 

\--

Then there was Malik. Malik who came to them—starving, bloody and rabid. Malik who had to be watched every moment of the day (even when he was drugged into sleep) because he had used everything from paper to his own teeth to try to saw his left arm off. 

If life were fair—truly fair—Malik would not have survived the process that had turned him into a monstrous impersonation of a person. His brain would have been slowly suffocated and his body would have fallen into ruin and he would have come to a merciful end. But that had no happened to him—because Lucy had made a promise to herself when she picked him off the street and she was faithful to her word even in the worst circumstances. It was her diligence that had kept Malik alive and her promise that motivated Rosario to bother with Malik at all.

“I’m not losing another man to him,” Rosario said to him. She threw an English-to-Arabic dictionary at his head. “Figure out what to do with him.”

It started through a metal door, with Shaun reciting words from the dictionary while Malik raved inside in barely intelligible howls or lay drooling against the door with mumbled-corrections to his mispronunciation of familiar words.

Abbas found him, after a time, and taught him how to use the words in sentences—how to speak like he understood what he was saying and how to address Malik to show the right respect. The man was still a child—so terribly young in this new body—but he had the age of his former life sitting heavy on his shoulders in those cramped moments just out of hearing range of Malik’s cell.

“Why do you care?” Shaun asked. “I hate to be crude but you imprisoned, tortured and murdered Malik in your last lifetime. I can’t imagine you’re terribly interested in his well-being now.”

“Rosario asked me to,” Abbas said. “So I did.”

\--

The first thing Shaun learned to say was ‘safety and peace, brother’ and it earned him safe entry into Malik’s room. They considered one another for days while Malik paced the room from one side to the other. He had reduced the interior of his room to chaos and slept like an animal in piles of the torn bedding and pillows. He ate with his hands and drew on the walls with red sauce and blood (when necessary). 

Shaun brought him a marker and practiced his Arabic while Malik drew Jerusalem on the walls, floors and his own skin when he run out of places. They were not friends, they did not have a connection but they had learned to live in peaceful cohabitation for a time. 

A novice brought them lunch a week later, they left a fork on the tray and Malik pinned Shaun to the floor with a tight hand on his throat and a fork shoved through his side. His eyes were bright-and-wide and _fearsome_ with intent. Being stabbed was a memorable event in his life but being stabbed _twice_ made the memory gray out and fade. There were many men that saved him from Malik and a blur of doctors and a cup full of pills as they sewed up the damage on his chest and assured him no major organs were injured.

Abbas found him again, laying out on his bed feeling soupy and sorry for himself. He looked at the bandages on Shaun’s chest and shook his head at him. “He wasn’t trying to kill you. History remembers Altair as the superior Assassin but it was Malik who never faltered in accuracy. You’re alive because he let you live.”

“Charming,” Shaun said. He took a day to wallow in his pity, a day to question his dedication to saving Malik’s life when his own seemed so easily expendable to the man, and then he picked himself up and carried his tired-sore-body back to Malik’s cell.

\--

Malik was a drooling disaster in the aftermath of the attack on Shaun. He was sedated to the point of uselessness and left lying in a puddle of his own filth. Shaun enlisted a helpful novice to clean Malik and the room. 

He waited until the drugs wore off and sat on the floor just out of arm’s distance from Malik as he woke up. There was a grayness in Malik’s face that stretched his skin thin and made him look like the living dead. “You and I must reach an understanding,” he said in careful-Arabic. “I am your last chance, so if you have any desire to live you will not attack me again.”

“And if I don’t?” Malik asked.

“If you don’t want to live? I’ll make your death a good deal more merciful than slow starvation.”

Malik went back to sleep with that promise.

\--

Progress was slow. Malik came back into humanity with baby-steps. There was an absence of motivation in his life that made his progress sluggish-at-best. Shaun spent long hours of the night searching through history for something that would wake up some vital spark of _being_ that Malik would need to _live_.

When it came to him, it was a smug-smile chasing after Rosario’s retreating back. Abbas saw him looking and the smile slid off his face as his teeth showed through the fullness of his lips. 

Shaun found Malik sitting with his arms wrapped around his body, legs crossed and eyes staring glassily at the wall. (The drugs he was on were too strong, too overwhelming but unfortunately too necessary.) He sat next to him on the floor, leaned their bodies together too close for his words to be overheard and all but pressed his lips to Malik’s ear when he said, “Abbas is here, if you don’t improve, he’s going to do the same now that he did before.”

Oh-and-something like a fire lit in Malik’s chest because he wasn’t the pale-zombie thing of so many weeks but something furious and _alive_ when he turned to look at Shaun. “Where?” is what he said.

“You have to convince them to let you out,” Shaun said, “you have to _try_.”

\--

The truth was, he spent every waking-moment (minus the time Rosario dragged him away to plan, to research or to offer advice) with Malik. He trained him, he fed him, he watched him shower until the Assassins were convinced the threat Malik posed was minimal and therefore acceptable. 

Shaun planned Malik’s missions when he was finally sent out, he guided him through them. He congratulated him, he celebrated with him, he offered Malik the little-white pills in decreasing amounts with his mouth bloody from the secrets he couldn’t tell him. Malik came back into living _at last_. He was fully-awake and fully-aware.

But Abbas was a dangerous beast play-acting as a man.

\--

Shaun believed in Rosario as much as he’d believed in anyone. He had chosen her over a dozen other candidates that had come to him requesting his loyalty and he’d stood by her to build her empire to the functioning unit it was. His slow-betrayal was a matter of necessity but not choice. 

It started with, “we should keep Abbas and Malik separate,” when they were alone. 

It escalated to Abbas asking him why he should be afraid of Malik, like it was such a laughable notion. Shaun said, “he may look human, but he’s not as in control of his impulses as you are. I’m just afraid of what he’d do if given the chance.”

And it went on, Shaun cautioning Rosario against putting her new boyfriend into danger while he dropped subtle adoration in Abbas’ direction so the man’s ego pumped up bigger-and-bigger. 

It took months, but it ended in a bloody mess at Arlo Moretti’s villa with one final gunshot.

\--

 

Shaun let them hit him because he deserved it. He sat in dreary half-sleep in between of the bouts of their fists bruising his skin and contemplated the nature of his betrayal and the good he hoped it would achieve. (He thought if Malik was faring as well as him, if he was still alive at all.) When they hit him, he thought about nothing but the merciful end of the pain that was sure to come.

He was stripped naked and left in a room too cold for comfort until Rosario-herself-decided to speak to him. When she came, her eyes were red-ringed and her shoulders were tired with grief. 

“Tell me what happened,” she said.

“Abbas attempted to take on ten armed guards by himself, he was shot repeatedly. Malik successfully assassinated the target and circled back around to take out the guards. Abbas was mortally wounded and Malik shot him.”

“Malik killed him,” Rosario repeated.

“Abbas would have died either way,” Shaun said.

Rosario slapped him and it was a sharp-insult to his exhausted body. He didn’t fall but it was only because her hand was on his jaw holding him in place. “You were supposed to control your pet, Shaun. You were supposed to make him do what we wanted him to do.”

“He’s a person. They rarely make good pets,” Shaun said. She left him in the room until she was ready to make use of him again. He found himself cleaned, dressed and sent to ask Malik what he had to say for himself. 

\--

Being sent to America was an insult on top of the injury he had already sustained. Being sent with Malik who had been starved-for-God-knows-how-long was an unacceptable insult. Being sent into the den of a suspected Templar without warning was an unforgiveable insult, but being sent to a Templar den to recruit _Altair Ibn’La-Ahad_ was _unthinkable._.

Shaun was left with the task of convincing Malik who hated nothing so much as he hated having been reborn in this world, to find and do the same to a man that he more than likely loved more than he loved his own life. He had expected Malik to stab Altair so many times he body wouldn’t even be recognizable as human but Malik came back to him with a sense of calm that he hadn’t managed in all the many weeks they had known one another.

\--

Life wasn’t fair, and Shaun had no expectation that it would ever be. He had no illusions left of fairness but he still couldn’t help the hurt in his chest when Malik’s hands caught him up and Malik’s body fit against his. Shaun kissed Malik because he’d made a choice months ago about what was-most-important and he’d spent a year at Malik’s side making him into something like a human again and he’d found himself caught in a whirlwind of things he couldn’t explain that _hurt_ like bruises on his _bones_. 

Malik’s mouth against his was as close to _happiness_ as he’d managed in longer than he’d admit. There was no purpose in it, no greater-good to achieve by sacrificing this, but the simple physical pleasure of it. He opened his mouth and Malik’s tongue was against his—Shaun would have given him anything he asked for, would have stripped naked and begged for it if only Malik seemed like he wanted it. 

But Shaun-was-a-genius, and Shaun-was-good-at-conspiracies. He pushed Malik away from him when he wanted to claw into his skin and dig his name like a scar into the man’s body. He said, “Altair.”

He wanted Malik to tell him he was ridiculous, but he didn’t. He wanted it to be a lie, a pointless objection, but it wasn’t. Shaun touched Malik’s face, “I’m not being noble, I am being practical. I don’t want to die a hideously painful death.” 

There was regret on Malik’s face then, quickly overtaken and suffocated by anger. But the regret made the way Malik pulled back and punched him across the face bearable (at least). Malik’s voice was pure venom (the way his face had looked when he stabbed Shaun with a fork). “He’ll be expecting it,” he said like spitting on Shaun, “I’m only being practical.”

\--

Shaun smoked a cigarette in solitude, waited for Altair-to-find-him and tried to figure out what he’d do about it. But it was Rebecca that came out to sit at his side, her quiet presence the same as it had always been as she pulled the headphones away from her ears and turned her face up to look at the stars. 

“It is just not your year, Shaun,” she said.

Shaun liked at the bloody split in his lip. “It’s not over yet. Maybe, if I’m very lucky we’ll find Ezio, reincarnate him and he can punch me too.”

Rebecca laughed and squeezed his shoulder. “You could have just let it happen, you know. It’s not like he doesn’t have a reason to like you; you saved his life.”

“He doesn’t love me,” Shaun said.

“Fuck’em,” Rebecca said.

Shaun snorted at that. He dropped the cigarette butt into the grass and stomped on it until the orange glow was smothered into a dull ash gray. He put his arm around her and she leaned in against his body. “If we survive this, remind me to take you out to dinner.”

“You do actually know how to use a sniper rifle, right?” she said quietly. 

“Yes, I do. And I need you to get the hell out of here before I do. Go to William if you have to, but find a stable camp and hide in it until the shit storm calms down.” He leaned his head against hers and she put her arm around his back. “And in the event Altair maims me beyond recognition, please mourn my pretty face.”

“Of course,” Rebecca said. 

\--


End file.
